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BAGHDAD BUREAU

Like many others, I was intrigued by the attention the film “American Sniper” was getting. I knew I was treading murky waters, but I decided to follow the herd and see the movie. Unlike most people in the crowd, I had a very personal stake in the film. “American Sniper” takes place in Iraq, my homeland, which I left shortly after the American-led invasion that Chris Kyle took part in. So the film, powerful and sad, left me with mixed thoughts and reminiscences.

Falluja — where much of the movie takes place — was, for American troops, a city of demons and horror. But before the 2003 invasion, during the years of the embargo against Iraq, Falluja was known as little more than a transit hub frequented by travelers heading to the western border with Jordan – as well as for its tasty kebab. Three days before the invasion, a group of five teenagers from Baghdad, my son among them, drove there after midnight for a late meal. It was the norm. Nobody was hurt.

When I was back in Baghdad in 2010, I found that my skills on the very roads where I had learned to drive were no longer viable because of traffic jams caused by checkpoints and blast walls. I had to be transported around by a cast of fearful drivers. One driver, Sa’ad, told me quietly one day, “I cannot serve you tomorrow.” When I asked why, he replied that he had to go to Hilla — about 70 miles south of Baghdad — to bring the children of his dead brother to their grandmother’s home. His eyes were teary.

In 2006, his brother, he and a cousin were in a car that broke down near an American base. While the three were leaning under the car’s hood, trying to fix the engine, someone – perhaps an American sniper – shot and killed the brother and cousin. Shielded from the sniper’s sight by the car, Sa’ad was spared.

“His head was on the radiator, and I was too scared to do anything,” Sa’ad said, sobbing. After the killing of her husband, Sa’ad’s sister-in-law moved with her children to her parents’ house in Hilla.

Then I remembered attending a doctor’s funeral in Amman in 2006. He had been shot in the head, apparently by an American soldier, while driving home from his clinic in Baghdad. The air conditioning was on in his car at the time, so he did not hear orders to stop. The doctor was 62. “We are very sorry,” his wife said the Americans told her son afterward. “Sorry will not bring him back,” she said, crying.

Sa’ad must have noticed my distraught face as he told me about his brother. “Sniper attacks, as much as they feel personal and painful, are a trivial fraction of the war,” he said. “What if I tell you about the victims of random killings, mortar attacks, raids, crossfires and explosions.” Since Sa’ad is the paternal uncle, he is obligated to support his late brother’s family.

“We leave it to God, the greatest avenger,” he said.

In the movie, I could not understand the connection between Iraq and 9/11 for people like Chris Kyle. Like many people in Iraq, I had not heard of Al Qaeda until the United States was attacked that day, even though I was working as a press officer at a European embassy.

On July 19, 2003, my daughter, son and I left Baghdad. Baghdad International Airport was under the control of the United States military, and it was allowing it to be used only for military purposes. So Iraqis had to make the 10-hour drive to Amman. At the border, an American soldier stood guard. He was barely 18, pimples filling his ruddy baby face.

“I just want to speak with someone,” he said, popping his head into our passenger-side window. “I have not spoken with anyone for a week now.”

I felt sorry for him, a stranger in this desert. I wondered out loud what had brought him here. He said he was trying to pay for college.

About 4,500 American soldiers and 500,000 Iraqis lost their lives to this war, not to mention those who were left with long-term disabilities. The Iraqi diaspora caused by the American-led invasion is among the largest in modern history. The first question Iraqis who were in Iraq in 2003 ask one another when connecting on social media is: “Which country are you in?” No family has been left untouched.

You might think that, after all these years and after all the tears and changes of jobs, cities, countries and even nationalities, I would have become desensitized to the war. But the movie made me realize that I am not. Evidently, the scars of those days will remain with me forever.

Yasmine Mousa is an Iraqi-Canadian journalist who left Iraq in 2003. She is also a certified translator and interpreter.

Andrew P. Clifford, pictured in Baghdad in 2003, was a machine-gunner with the Marines in Iraq.Credit Courtesy Andrew P. Clifford

I usually forget about most dreams right after I wake, but I never forget the ones that involve combat. I collect those dreams and save them, locking them in a fortified mental safe I rarely open because the images may turn into nightmares. The war dreams are the pictures I never took. They are the souvenirs of war, the thoughts that continue to humble me. Some people might think that remembering such experiences would have destructive side effects. But for me, the dreams are a reminder of how valuable life is.

Driving Into War: March 24, 2003

As our convoy of Marines from of Regimental Combat Team 1 pushed forward, I saw an Iraqi man in the distance walking alone on the side of the road. He was wearing what looked like a long red and orange scarf. But as our truck drew closer, I realized that it was not a scarf. The man was carrying a dead body over his right shoulder. The body was covered in blood that was dripping onto the man’s calves.

The dead man had dark eyes, a scruffy black beard and a bullet hole through his shoulder. The man carrying his body gazed right at me, as if he wanted to hurt me in some way. He spit on the ground and adjusted the body over his shoulder. At that moment, I realized that, to him, I was the enemy. I was thinking that both of them could have been in the Iraqi military and just changed out of their uniforms. It was the first dead body that I had ever seen.

As we drew closer to the battlefield, I could smell it in the air. It smelled like some weird combination of burned flesh and gunpowder. I could hear and feel the pounding of artillery hitting the ground. I didn’t know if the Iraqi Republican Guard or the United States-led coalition forces were doing the firing. In the distance Cobra helicopters were hovering like a pack of black crows, firing rounds from the sky. They looked like dragons breathing fire on a medieval town. We were getting closer to war. Reality began to sit in.

Gharraf: March 25, 2003

After driving through the night, at daylight we crossed a bridge over the Euphrates River. The water was pitch black. There were blown-up Soviet tanks facing to the south, surrounded by beautiful palm trees. I began to see disabled vehicles, some military and some civilian, on both sides of the highway. I even saw a disabled Abrams tank, something that my ignorant mind at the time thought was indestructible. I began to hear popping in the distance, like the noise you hear down the block on July 4. But this popping was not fireworks; it was bullets and grenades.

We were moving through the city of Nasiriya. The winds began to pick up, and sand clouded my vision. Nature was getting involved with the war. My ski goggles were shattered by the sandstorm. Near the front, Marines were in the prone position, shooting into the distance. Those Marines had dark stares on their faces, stares that came from an overload of horror, excitement, adrenaline, lack of food and lack of rest. It was a stare I was beginning to develop. Field grade officers had their 9-millimeter pistols drawn, radios in their other hands. I saw a machine-gunner firing .50-caliber rounds from on top of a Humvee into a cement building. Enemy muzzle flashes popped up from the windows. The concrete blocks were turning into rubble.

All of a sudden, things slowed down. We were under attack. I could hear rounds whizzing by. Marines yelled, “Contact front, contact front!” We were taking small-arms fire from about 300 meters to the west. I could hear the sound of bullets ricocheting off our vehicle. I could see the muzzle flashes directly ahead. The Marines to my right and left looked at me. We confirmed with that look that the moment was real and that it was time for us to attack the people who were trying to kill us.

As we jumped off the truck, my heart was beating abnormally fast, pounding like a drum. But strangely my breathing was smooth and calm, just as the marksman instructors at boot camp had trained us. “Inhale, exhale, focus on the front sight tip, slow, steady, squeeze.” In a chaotic moment, the first time I was a target, I reverted back to that training. And the training is what kept us alive.

We landed feet first in mud, about 15 inches of it. It was thick like cement and smelled of feces. For a second I stood there. I heard a zipping noise go right past me and then I saw a spark. I was being shot at. I freed my right foot from the muck and began running for cover. I fired rounds while on my stomach. I pushed myself up with my left hand and rose from the prone position. I was knocked down by the wind. I got up again, moved two feet, and fell again. I was back on my stomach with no cover this time but with a panoramic view of Marines engaged in the firefight. I saw one Marine fire a grenade into the window of a cement building. I saw team leaders yelling at Marines. I got back up, grabbed my black ammunition bag full of 7.62 rounds and began moving toward the sound of the guns.

I began to get angry. I was mad at the weather, mad at the people who were trying to kill me, mad at the people who were trying to kill my comrades. I got up and began to fire. I looked into the iron sight of my rifle, focused on a muzzle flash and repeatedly pulled the trigger. And then, suddenly, my executive officer yelled, “Cease fire, cease fire!” The firefight was over.

I was tired. My heart was beating rapidly and I wanted it to beat normally. There were Marines lying on their stomachs all around me, their weapons facing out. I couldn’t help but notice that there were smiles on their faces. One would think they were sick to be smiling after a gun battle.

But it was the first time many of them had seen combat. We had been training for months for the moment that had just passed. The training proved good because we had survived the test, the test of real bullets.

“Clifford, you all right?” my squad leader asked. Calmly, robotically, looking off into the distance, I replied, “I am good to go, Sergeant.”

The rest of my squad were standing in a tight-knit circle, trying to keep warm. We had all made it.

Andrew Clifford was a machine-gunner in Iraq in 2003, part of the first Marine Corps infantry reserve unit to deploy. He received a master’s degree in public administration from Golden Gate University in 2012 and currently works as a police officer in San Francisco.

Adnan Pachachi is a Sunni Arab political leader who has long played a prominent role in Iraq — as a foreign minister before Saddam Hussein’s rule, as a president of the Iraqi Governing Council set up by the West after Hussein’s ouster, and as a leading figure in the secular Iraqiya coalition. Ten years after the invasion, he wrote to At War to give his perspective on the miscalculations of the war.

The first thing that struck me on my return to Iraq in May 2003 was the belief of many Iraqis, especially the young, that the United States’ presence, even as an occupying power, would benefit Iraq. They were impressed by American achievements, particularly in science and technology. There was hope that Iraq’s hard-working people and the country’s great natural wealth would, with American guidance and assistance, make Iraq one of the most advanced nations in the world.

All those hopes and expectations soon disappeared, to be replaced by frustration, anger and resentment. So what went wrong?

Here are some of the things that may have contributed to this failure.

First, change came as a result of a war of doubtful legality that the United Nations Security Council had refused to endorse. Second, the United States came to Iraq without a clear and coherent plan to move the country from dictatorship to democracy.

A third reason was that the United States was unprepared to take over the administration of the country and shoulder the responsibility of maintaining peace and order in the wake of the total collapse of government structures. In these circumstances, the first responsibility of the occupying power in preventing the country from sliding into anarchy and lawlessness should have been to reinstate the police and security services.

Unfortunately, nothing was done, and the occupying troops had to act as policemen. They were neither trained nor equipped for such a task, and at the slightest provocation they used excessive force against Iraqi civilians.

A fourth reason was that corruption was rife. While Iraqis had become inured to corruption after years of sanctions and administrative mismanagement, they did not expect the complicity of some American officers and officials in pushing projects of doubtful benefit and legality that cost Iraq billions of dollars that are still unaccounted for.

Finally, perhaps the most serious mistake the United States made was to organize the new political system in Iraq on a sectarian basis. They had the preconceived idea that Iraqi society by its nature was divided along sectarian lines. That was a fallacy. As a result, the secular groups did not receive the recognition they deserved, and the government fell under the influence of religious and ethnic parties. Fully exploiting their built-in advantages, they established a regime that proved over the years to be incapable of governing the country.

My fear that their incompetence and corruption, and particularly their subservience to Iran, would result in Iraq’s becoming a failed state has unfortunately been borne out. The most tangible result of American involvement in Iraq has been the consolidation of Iran’s influence and power in the country. The United States had the means to prevent this but lacked the will and determination.

The war began for me while I was sitting on a couch in a living room. Like many people, I watched it all commence on television. At a friend’s house on campus, I sat with a few college friends and drank Bud Ice from bottles. We weren’t drinking beer because of the war; we were drinking simply because, being in college, it was something we often did. White smoke from an explosion would burst up from the cityscape of Baghdad as the sound echoed through the dark. Yellow tracers from antiaircraft fire sprayed randomly into the sky. The ticker on the bottom of the screen euphemistically summarized what was happening (while adding some alliteration and a subtle rhyme): “Large explosion rocks Iraq’s capital.”

By March 2003, I had been enlisted in the Army National Guard for nearly two years. I’d signed on in June 2001 for the standard six-year commitment — roughly three months before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. During the invasion of Iraq, I was still certain I wouldn’t deploy anywhere (I am sure the Pentagon and our president at the time might have agreed with this certainty). Mostly I imagined, as many of my military friends imagined, that we’d be taking care of Army bases while active-duty forces deployed. No one needs to be told now that these were poor assumptions.

In that living room, being the only person in the military, my friends treated me as some kind of expert regarding the war, the invasion, everything we were watching on television. Truly, I was the military-affairs expert and spokesman in that living room. At 19 years old, I was glad to show off some of the new knowledge I’d gained in basic training (completed in October 2002) about weapons, vehicles and basic soldiering skills. As we watched what was probably B-roll of Marines and their vehicles, I would say, “That’s an M2 Bradley, shoots 25 millimeter rounds.” “That’s an M1A1, I drove those in Basic.”

I would explain the specifications of the tank, the massive size of it, the mind-numbing sound of its main gun firing a round. Before completing Basic Training, I had had my share of failures: kicked out of a private high school for poor grades my sophomore year, cut from the basketball team at the other high school my senior year, rejected by multiple universities and colleges due to my not-so-stellar grade point average of 2.7. So at the time, sitting in front of that television and being able to understand, at least on the surface level, what these machines were and who these men were felt good, even meaningful. In my reserve unit I felt a sense of community, of purpose, and although I didn’t know these soldiers on the screen and I wouldn’t be driving into Iraq with them, I still felt a deep bond, a connection that binds all who are in the same military.

I didn’t intend or want to go to war, but I still felt a draw to it, a strange attraction. Christopher Isherwood writes of growing up in the 1920s in England after World War I: “I was obsessed by a complex of terrors and longings connected with the idea ‘war.’ ‘War,’ in this purely neurotic sense, meant ‘the test.’ The test of your courage, your maturity. …’Are you really a man?’ Unconsciously I believe, I longed to be subjected to this test, but I also dreaded failure.” This idea of “the test” summed up much of what I felt while watching the war unfold. Part of me wanted to take part in “the test,” to be there on the ground with others I had trained with at Fort Knox. In some ways, I felt regret for not being there, for sitting on the “wrong” side of the screen. But at the same time the possibility of failing, which could mean anything from cowardly hiding during a fight to just getting killed, made me less eager. I hadn’t joined active duty; I had joined as a reservist.

Meanwhile, explosions were happening all over a country I knew very little about. Politically, at the time, I felt supportive of what was going on: Saddam Hussein might give illicit weapons to those who might use them against us; his government has connections with Al Qaeda; most of all, we must kill Mr. Hussein (we had chanted many times in Basic Training, “Gotta train, gotta train, gotta train to kill Hussein”). You might think you’re informed, but in the end, you’re just a 19-year-old boy from northeast Ohio drinking Bud Ice on a couch.

In that room, we were aware that “war” was beginning and that, although we couldn’t understand it or fully comprehend why, something significant was happening. In Stephen Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage,” before going into battle, Henry Fleming felt that “he was about to mingle in one of those great affairs of the earth.” I felt a similar sense, although in my case, I was about to watch, and was already watching, this “great affair” unfold. Clearly, the “great” used by Crane is not meant in any way to be celebratory or positive. His “great” is more associated with the largeness, the monumentality, the extreme effects upon the land and the people, before, during and after those first bombs fell, or in Henry’s case, when the Union clashed with the Confederates.

In that living room I understood this importance, though I couldn’t articulate it at the time and I couldn’t imagine how much that place being bombed would affect me in roughly one year. All of us sat on couches and watched the war begin through the same medium we’d watched a basketball game, a reality-show, a film on DVD. If I had any trouble comprehending the reality of that country, its people, the explosions that had already happened and the explosions yet to come, in less than a year I would cross Iraq’s border with Kuwait in my own up-armored Humvee. Until then, I’d continue to watch through a television.

Hugh Martin served from June 2001 to June 2007 in the Ohio Army National Guard as an M1A1 Tanker and deployed to Iraq in 2004. His chapbook of poetry, “So, How Was the War?” (Kent State University Press, 2010) was published by the Wick Poetry Center, and his first book, “The Stick Soldiers,” won the 2012 Poulin Prize from BOA Editions and will be released in April 2013. He is now a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, Calif.

Mohammed Hussein is a former head of the newsroom in The New York Times’s Baghdad bureau. He fled to Syria in 2007 at the height of the sectarian fighting, returned in 2008 when the situation improved, then moved to the United States with his family in 2010 under a program in which Iraqi interpreters working with Americans could receive special immigrant visas. His previous blog posts can be read here.

One of my few memories from childhood is feeling horror at the sound of sirens. That was while my home country was at war with Iran – I was very young, and I did not really know what war was. We lived in Baghdad, and I remember my parents’ painting the windows of our house a dark color to camouflage us against the nightly Iranian air raids.

That war was followed by three more in Iraq, and I lived through all of them. No one ever really won. Looking back, I’m reminded mostly of all the young men who lost their lives; of all the destroyed buildings – private houses, power stations, schools; of the huge number of people disabled, of widows and orphans left behind.

The war with Iran ended after eight years, in 1988. Our country’s people and wealth had been consumed. But just two years later, another war — Iraq invaded Kuwait, leading to international sanctions and more devastation. Just a couple of days before the United States launched Operation Desert Storm, some distant relatives of ours moved to Baghdad after living in Kuwait for 20 years. The whole family was killed when a stray cruise missile struck their house in Baghdad. I understood then that war is blind, a monster crushing all around it, making no exception for civilians, children, old people.

The first war I knew as an adult was when the coalition led by the United States and Britain toppled Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003.

During that war, my family didn’t leave our house in southeast Baghdad. Most of our neighbors left theirs and went to other Iraqi provinces, believing that the big and final battle would be in Baghdad. I will never forget the morning in April 2003 when the American ground forces passed through the neighborhood that I lived in, making their way to the airport.

The sky was so dark and smoky, and filled with the ugly growl of A10 warplanes as they struck at Iraqi ground forces. I had never thought it could come to this, and the images of burning bodies behind the steering wheels of cars will never leave my head.

As the American forces moved quickly toward Baghdad, the feeling in the city was gloomy. But for me, and I believe for most Iraqis at that time, there was a thought that great things never come without great sacrifices.

Despite all the miscalculations and tragedies of that war, the American forces so often played an important role as a neutral side, their presence a guarantor for all parties. All Iraqis remember how the American forces hunted down the Shiite militant groups that were supported by Iran, and when the American forces called upon Sunni insurgency groups to leave their arms and organized them into the so-called Awakening Councils. Another time we saw the American troops deploy their troops in the disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk to avoid possible clashes between Kurdish fighters, the pesh merga, and the Iraqi Army units controlled by the central government in Baghdad.

I am not saying that there were not any mistakes or negative consequences during and after the war, but I’m convinced that the Americans were making it easier to establish a democratic experience in Iraq. However, the Iraqi political leaders did not get it right. Instead, they turned everything upside down, exposing the country to regional divisions instead of living in coexistence.

Then the fourth war, and the worst — a civil war.

In February 2006, a radical Sunni group blew up Al Askari Shrine, a revered Shiite site in Samarra, and that was the spark. Sectarian war, all the Iraqi people involved in the most painful violence I’ve ever seen, turning the whole country into a hell.

Every single day, there were bombings targeting civilians and mosques. Innocent people from this sect or that religion were kidnapped and tortured with electric drills and acid injections. Bodies of victims were thrown onto the streets. The country drowned in blood, and Iraqi society fractured. It may take decades to recover.

I have many stories to tell about that dreadful period. One of my father’s friends was kidnapped, and the kidnappers asked for a ransom. His family borrowed and collected money from here and there to secure the ransom. A couple of days after they paid it, they found their father dead.

Another incident I remember involved one of our neighbors, a man nearly 70 years old. He, too, was kidnapped, then released a couple of days after and died right after his release. I went to give my condolences to his family, and talked to one of his sons. He said that his father told them that he had been injected with kerosene.

Today, three years after most American soldiers withdrew from Iraq, we see that the whole country is on the brink of another round of sectarian war. Once again there are assassination campaigns by killers using silenced weapons, threats to force Sunni and Shiite families from their neighborhoods, and car bombs striking here and there all around the country. As the political quarrel among Iraqi leaders continues, I cannot help but think how similar it all is to the 2006-7 civil war.

Each political group in Iraq has its own accusing tune. Sunnis are always complaining about what they called marginalization and exclusion from power, while on the other side we see the Shiite-led government calling everyone that opposes it a terrorist. As for Kurds, they are trying hard to establish a Kurdish nationality separate from the Arabs, without missing any opportunity that may lead to the establishment of their own state. Within those three major players, the other Iraqi minorities have been lost.

Before the American withdrawal, the majority of Iraqi people and leaders blamed the American presence as the only reason behind all the instability in Iraq, but now I do not know who can be blamed for what is happening.

I saw all these wars, lived through them and finally came to the realization that Iraq is not a decent place for my family. We left in 2010, moving to a place where we could bring up children in an environment away from sectarian violence and power struggles.

This week, The Times will feature reflections on the 10th anniversary of the invasion. We invite anyone who was directly affected by the invasion to submit their essays via atwar@nytimes.com. Please keep pieces to 500 words.

Soldiers in Kuwait prepped for a scud attack on March 19, 2003.Credit Don Gomez

“We launched some cruise missiles this morning or something. The war is officially on,” he said with the smug satisfaction of being the first to know.

“We’ll see,” I said. I had imagined being informed through some official authority, not a random soldier happy from another gorging on bread rolls and Kuwaiti yogurt.

I’d been here since Valentine’s Day. I had just turned 21. This was the longest I’d been away from home since basic training a couple of years earlier and the first time I’d left America.

Kuwait was a staging area and proving ground for the impending war. We spent each day training with an intensity I had never experienced. If we were not sharpening our marksmanship on some spartan desert range or preparing for violent house-to-house urban warfare in an abandoned Kuwaiti cityscape, we were toughening our bodies to the increasingly hot climate through twice-daily workouts, practicing how we would don our protective masks if we were attacked with chemicals, receiving intelligence updates on the Iraqi military’s latest movements, or packing and repacking our war gear.

Little time was wasted. It was exhausting and exhilarating. We moved with the certainty that each moment mattered. We believed that careful, disciplined preparation would ensure that we accomplished our mission and that it would increase our chances of coming home to tell the story.

Now, though, we were growing impatient. Saddam Hussein was stalling, like calling a timeout to ice a field goal kicker on the 10-yard line. We’d been ready to go for weeks, and felt like we were losing our edge. Plus, it grew hotter every day and we dreaded a fight in the extreme Iraqi heat.

At the chow hall, I moved through the line with my tray, cranking my head to watch the talking head on the giant projected television to see if we were at war. This screen was our only link to the outside world. The average American who scanned the cable news ticker in the morning knew more than we did.

After filling my tray, I sat down to eat. Normally there was no sound, but someone had set up speakers. The news anchor in the United States was talking with a journalist embedded with the Marines somewhere along the Iraq-Kuwait border. They were all wearing chemical suits and protective masks and talking about retaliatory missile attacks. Sucks to be them, I thought.

Suddenly, like a receding wave, the chow hall grew silent except for the sound of Wolf Blitzer’s voice. From outside, a terrifying wailing siren penetrated the thick cloth tent. We paused for the longest second before simultaneously realizing that, yes, we too were possibly in danger. Hundreds of soldiers reacted like they were under assault from bees, furiously standing and grabbing for their gas masks. Chairs toppled over. Atropine needles we kept in our bags to counter nerve agent spilled onto the wood floor.

I opened my case and pulled my mask out as I had practiced hundreds of times. I remembered that I was supposed to stop breathing, so I stopped, the sudden shutdown of my respiratory system instantly elevating my panic. I wondered briefly if I’d already been poisoned. I tightened my mask on my face, placed my hand over the air intake on the filter and breathed in deeply, ensuring that my mask was sealed.

I shuffled with the crowds pushing to the exit. I passed many soldiers who seemed to have no idea how to put their masks on and others who looked more embarrassed than scared that they did not have one.

Outside, the siren blared deafeningly. The omnipotent “voice of God” — some duty officer — let us know there was an incoming Scud missile. Soldiers with gas masks and guns — chemical superheroes — ran in all directions. It felt like the end of the world.

As I ran toward my unit area, my face flushed with heat and sweat and soon my mask was thoroughly fogged. Before I could get very far, another soldier grabbed me and pulled me into a small concrete bunker.

“I have to get back to my unit!” I pleaded.

“You won’t make it!” he said, clearly frightened.

I sat crouched against a wall of that bunker with him and others, strangers all breathing heavily together through our masks. Our eyes darted around in the large eye ports, making brief contact with one another, looking for reassurance but finding more panic. The siren continued. It suggested, “This is it; ready yourself.”

A couple of guys high-fived, boasting, “We just earned our combat patch, baby!” I thought about my unit, and waited for the Scud missile to crash into us.

Then, God’s voice announced that the Scud missile had been intercepted. Our masks came off. We were at war.

During those days in Kuwait, we were blissfully ignorant. We believed that what we were about to do was important and just. Among us, there were few cynics. We trained hard and when we crossed the border, we fought like tigers.

Almost a year later, I spent a couple of days at that same camp in Kuwait en route home for two weeks of leave. The tents were gone, replaced with semipermanent structures, coffee shops and fast food huts. I remember feeling infuriated that someone had transformed my precombat staging ground into a playground.

I sneered at the other soldiers stationed there who called home nightly to tell their family and friends about the “war.” I thought that war was over.

But I know now that it had only just begun.

Don Gomez is an old enlisted infantryman and a new infantry officer. During the invasion of Iraq, he served with the 82nd Airborne Division. He blogs at Carrying the Gun. Twitter: @dongomezjr

Iraq’s Wounds

In a country torn by wars foreign and domestic for three decades, many Iraqi families are scarred throughout generations. The Baghdad Bureau has written about the thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police officers who have suffered crippling injuries fighting alongside Americans in the latest of those wars. This video tells the story of one of those men.

TORONTO — How much Iraq, my home country, has changed. And I know all too well that the changes did not happen overnight. It was, and is, systematic destruction, and for me it started three decades ago during the run up to Baghdad’s last planned summit.

Back then, in 1981, I was a newly graduated civil engineer working on the V.V.I.P.B. – Very, Very Important Persons Building — at Baghdad International Airport, a project that was a symbol of glory, abundance and growth as Iraq prepared itself to host a 1983 conference of Non-Aligned Movement nations, a prestigious event during the cold war.

We Iraqi engineers were constantly encouraged by our seniors to learn from the overseas construction companies supervising the airport, and other projects. Baghdad was one large workshop.

BAGHDAD — These days, I barely recognize my hometown of Baghdad. It has been spruced up, painstakingly manicured for the Arab League’s first meeting here in two decades — as my colleague Jack Healy writes.

The city seems new, remade with flowers, palm trees, clean streets and repaved sidewalks. It is safe and empty at the same time, portions of it scrubbed of dirt, traffic — and Iraqis — for what is a milestone event for the Arab world, and perhaps for Iraq as well.

Khalid Mohammed/Associated PressAn Iraqi municipal worker watered flowers at Kahramana Square in downtown Baghdad, Iraq, on March 24, 2012, as the country prepared to host the Arab League summit. The poster in the background reads, “the Iraqi nation welcomes you.”

Maybe the summit, now in its second day, is mere window-dressing to obscure Iraq’s deep problems. But Iraqis, cynical after enduring so much violence, corruption and incompetence from their government, nevertheless hope that this could be a turning point for our country.

“Maybe these meetings can show that Iraq can hold its own among powerful Arab neighbors.”

Maybe these meetings can show the world how Iraq is recovering from the deep wounds of war. Maybe they can show that Iraq can hold its own among powerful Arab neighbors, that our country is not merely a puppet of Iran.

The summit has many claims to fame. It is the first major event in Iraq since the American military withdrew in December. The first summit meeting of the Arab League after the Arab Spring revolutions and uprisings changed the spirits of Arab societies. The first summit in Baghdad since Saddam Hussein was in power. The first Arab summit being led largely by two Kurds — President Jalal Talabani and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari — showing that Iraq’s own relations are more interconnected and cohesive than the simplistic idea that we are divided into Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Some Iraqis complain about the blockaded roads and extra checkpoints. Officials have confirmed that 100,000 security forces have deployed to Baghdad. Many people are angry that the government spent $500 million to remodel hotels, pave a few streets and buy armored cars for the Arab delegates, to say nothing of the one-week holiday for government workers. Many Iraqis have decamped to Kurdistan to spend the holiday there and escape Baghdad’s congestion.

Mustafa, a shop owner from the Sunni neighborhood of Amariya, in western Baghdad, shook his head at the idea that Iraq’s leaders could clean up the city for visiting leaders, but not for regular Iraqis.

“I remember a week ago I saw the roads were all dirty, and now they are all clean and beautiful,” he said. “So if the government wants to work they can do it, but it’s a matter of experience and qualifications.”

It is undeniable that the summit has captivated Iraq’s attention. Seemingly every newspaper and television station is covering the event, breathlessly updating viewers with news alerts to report the arrival of some trade minister or finance official to Baghdad’s airport. They have panel discussions and updates on each Arab country. Some Iraqi channels are playing special songs composed for the summit. Here are the jingoistic, pro-government lyrics of one tune:

“You have honored the Iraq of freedom. The situation has changed for better now that we have brave leaders.”

In the end, the summit may improve Iraq’s image, if it is not marred by catastrophic attacks. So far, Baghdad has been peaceful, and its leaders are crossing their fingers that it stays that way. It will not improve the fates of millions of Iraqis who live in dusty squatters’ camps, of those who sell candies and boxes of red tissues in the streets, of those who scrounge for garbage and live in crumbling homes where the power comes on for but a few hours each day.

But maybe, just maybe, the summit will help to encourage new foreign investments and kindle a revival that Iraq desperately needs, and deserves after suffering so much and for so long.

It may not solve all our problems, but it can at least show the world that Iraq is back, that we are still standing.

Duraid Adnan is an Iraqi journalist who works for The New York Times in Baghdad.

I had been working at a trauma center in Baghdad for some time when an opportunity came up to transfer back to my old job — at a maternity hospital in Sadr City. But I backed out at the last minute.

I knew the transfer would be good for me: I’d be far away from the stress and drama of the E.R., where I had spent a lot of time. I told myself that getting away would let me process what I had seen and experienced. But I wondered if I had gotten so used to chaos that I wouldn’t function in a peaceful, stable environment.

When the transfer offer came, I was responsible for this hospital’s female medical ward. Men and women are treated separately in hospitals here. Even the E.R. is segregated. When I worked there I preferred the male side, where you get mostly trauma cases with some uncomplicated surgeries thrown in. But on the female side, you get internal cases as well as serious psychological ones. The worst of these are suicide attempts. And there are a lot of them.

During one of my E.R. shifts, a 16-year-old girl was brought in by her aunt and brother, who were both terrified. They asked us not to tell her father that she had tried to kill herself because he would kill her if he knew. She had swallowed 25 diabetes pills. We discovered that her father and her stepmother had subjected her to constant verbal and physical abuse, which is why she wanted to end her life. She arrived in critical condition with very low blood sugar. But with our care she recovered. Then, we discharged her — back to the abuse she had tried to flee.

I’ve also seen quite a few women who’ve burned themselves. They’re of a type: young, married and very poor. Their families, fearing disgrace, always deny that the women have tried to commit suicide. But as we press them, the story gradually changes. Burns, which often cover most of their bodies, are one of the toughest aspects of my E.R. work — along with blast victims. I never really get over these things.

But what angers me most is that, if they survive, these women almost never get any counseling or psychiatric help — though they are often abused, deeply angry and severely damaged even before they come to the emergency room.

These women are especially at risk in a health care system in which overworked doctors like me focus only on saving their lives; healing their invisible wounds is another story. Even though Iraqis have been living in a violent, unstable environment for years, there is still no culture of mental health care here. It has little to no support from the state or health authorities, and people who do seek psychiatric help are stigmatized by their families and society: these two truths reinforce each other. Even blast victims, if they recover, don’t get counseling.

But women’s mental health in particular has no place in a tribal, male-dominated society like Iraq, where women still struggle to own our own lives. You don’t get to decide what’s best for you. There always has to be a man in your life who decides that, and then makes sure you put up with the consequences.

I’m a successful professional, but my second-class status came home to me again recently when I applied for an Iraqi passport. I was told that wasn’t possible: I don’t have first-degree male relatives (a husband, father, or brother) who would prevent me from traveling outside of Iraq, embracing a liberal lifestyle and committing ”sin.” With a lot of help from an insider — paid help — I got the passport. But not until officials asked me a series of humiliating and insulting questions about just what I intended to do if I traveled.

As a female doctor, I’ve had to develop a tough exterior to earn the respect of others and to get things done. I’m not easily intimidated now. But if a woman like me, with an education, a profession and a good job, still has trouble being heard in Iraqi society, it’s hard to imagine how these desperate women in the E.R. — and at the bottom of the social ladder — will ever get the care they need.

Lubna Naji is a 25-year-old junior doctor who works in the countryside in Iraq’s Wasit Province. She qualified in 2010 and worked for a time in a major trauma center in Baghdad. Her first post was about the Dec. 22 bombings in Baghdad in which more than 60 Iraqis were killed.

BAGHDAD — The largest cemetery in the restive province of Diyala has more than 20,000 graves, some date back as far as 1600 A.D., and covers more than a mile and a half of land.

The cemetery also has something that few others in the world have: living residents.

Over the past several years, about 25 families fled to the cemetery from poor villages that had been taken over by insurgents.

The cemetery, which sits in the middle of the province’s capital, Baquba, was a safe haven, the residents said. Although there were dead people, there were no explosions or assassinations.

Even though the United States has withdrawn all of its troops from Iraq, the residents have remained at the cemetery because the province is still one of the most violent in the country.

The families knocked over centuries-old gravestones, building mud huts over the ground where bodies had been buried. The gravestones that were not knocked over were used to make clotheslines, and others became hiding places for children playing the Iraqi version of “cops and robbers.”

“We were scared playing among the graves, but we got used to it,” said an 8-year-old boy named Mohamed. “We have no other place to live in, and nobody to take care of us.”

When there are burials, the children often attend the ceremonies. Some beg for money, while others try to find out how the person died and report back to their friends about the death.

“The most difficult time for cemetery residents is the Islamic holiday of Eid and other Islamic holidays when people come to the cemetery to mourn and scream and cry,” said Akram Yasir, 40, who lives near the cemetery. “With people screaming and moaning for hours, it really scares children.”

Abu Adnan, 54, who lives with his family in the cemetery, said that he often had dreams about the dead bodies that his house rests on.

“I dream sometimes of dead spirits calling me to move my house,” said Mr. Adnan. “I can hear them say ‘Move away from our heads, you are too heavy.’ Sometimes I turn on the radio and listen to the reading of the Koran to make me feel relaxed and safe.”

Khalisa Mustafa, a housewife who lives in the cemetery, said that she feared nighttime because “the environment is so scary.”

Ms. Mustafa, 35, added: “Poverty pushed us to live among the dead.”

Not surprisingly, there is no running water or sewage system in the cemetery. So, the residents have created several small channels that carry dirty water away from their homes. But the channels have expanded, washing away some gravestones.

“Most of these families represent the results of the sectarian conflict,” said Nasir Al-Shimary, a human-rights activist in Baquba. “If the government doesn’t seriously address the country’s problems, there will be more people living in cemeteries in the future.”

An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Diyala Province.

The boom and shudder of numerous explosions woke me. It was my first morning in Baghdad in nearly five years, and, coincidentally, only days after the withdrawal of the American troops from Iraq.

I expected the massive bombs would cause a large numbers of casualties, and the timing of the explosions — during rush-hour traffic — to have substantial impact on the lives of Baghdadis. I also expected that most Iraqis would react to the bombings much as they had during the bleak days of violence, 2005-2008. Then, people hid in their homes, unwilling to risk opening their shops or going to work.

A couple hours later, I drove through a neighborhood where one of the bombs had been detonated. It was one of the busiest residential and commercial areas in the city. The target of the attack was offices of the government’s Integrity Commission. At least 23 people died on this block alone. The whole block was damaged. Broken glass and furniture, bricks and dust were all over the place.

But at the same time, Iraqis were going about their daily activities. Just a block beyond the worst of the damage, the stores were open and shop owners were busily sweeping up the debris. The streets were full of pedestrians. I asked the taxi driver why life looked so normal, and he responded matter-of-factly, “We got too used to living this life. We have no other life.”

This has become Iraq’s new normalcy, living amid the violence and political crises and uncertainty.

The owner of a pastry shop told me that the demand for Christmas and New Years party cakes has been steady. Another, the owner of a clothing store damaged by the bombings, told me that he planned to reopen his store as soon as he finished what he wryly called “renovations” to his shop.

I now live abroad, but what has happened to my country saddens me. Few Iraqis even consider today’s Baghdad compared wijth what it was in the 1970s, when it was a safe, beautiful city. People only compare it with the worst years of sectarian violence, when conflict nearly tore the society apart, and conclude that their security has improved.

Later, I passed by a list of the names of the Integrity Commission employees who perished in this latest bombing. Their job was to enforce the rule of law, to make Iraq more livable and more secure. Few Iraqis continue to believe in democracy as they once did, or that Iraq will get better with the American withdrawal. They only believe that the country’s future has become dramatically less certain.

Razzaq al-Saiedi is a former member of The New York Times Baghdad bureau, and currently is a senior researcher with Physicians for Human Rights.

Now that the United States military has left Iraq, the long-term legacy of two decades of war and sanctions will become clearer over the coming months and years. Not only through violence, but also in the emergence – or otherwise – of civil institutions and their ability to provide basic services. Here, one Iraqi doctor writes about how her hospital is coping.

BAGHDAD – For the first time since 2003 at the trauma center where I work in Baghdad, female doctors are now running the women’s side of the E.R. during the night shift.

After 2003, two male doctors used to run the E.R. from midnight to 8 a.m., even on the women’s side. But now the hospital’s administration says there’s no reason why we female doctors shouldn’t run the female side late at night.

2011: Year in Iraq

For Iraqis and Americans, 2011 was marked by the issue of whether the United States military would stay or leave. In Tuesday’s TimesCast, The Times’s Baghdad bureau chief, Tim Arango, looks back at the process of deciding that question, and at other news from the year in Iraq.

In his report, he notes that United States is leaving behind a politically fragile country, where sectarian differences have not been completely resolved and concerns have arisen about the amount of power wielded by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. As for daily life in Iraq, Mr. Arango says, “The country today seems someplace between war and peace.”

BAGHDAD — In the years before coming to Iraq to cover the American withdrawal, I was a sports reporter and several times covered games in which players, managers and coaches experienced stunning defeats.

Andrea Bruce for The New York TimesU.S. Ambassador to Iraq, James F. Jeffrey, at his residence at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Sometimes they lost because of their own errors. Other times, they lost because of things completely out of their control, like an umpire’s bad call.

The remarkable thing I found about these defeats, though, was that those who lost almost always candidly acknowledged their mistakes and said what they could have done better.

Apparently, this is not how international diplomacy works.

A day after President Obama announced on Friday that all American troops would be out of Iraq by the end of the year, the United States ambassador here, James F. Jeffrey, invited members of the news media to his residence to brief us on the decision.

For the president, the announcement followed through on his campaign promise to end the war.

But for the ambassador, it was something far different. Over the past year, the ambassador had labored intensely to reach a deal with the Iraqi government to keep a substantial number of troops here.

Mr. Jeffrey wanted the troops to stay because he believed the fledgling Iraqi military needed continual training from American troops. He knew that keeping troops in Iraq would push back on Iran’s influence in the region. And he believed the troops would help the State Department, which will have a massive presence here in years to come, get around a country where the security is still tenuous.

In the meeting with reporters, the ambassador did not want to acknowledge that his arguments for a significant troop presence after 2011 had lost out.

In fact, he said he was encouraged by the decision.

“I’m quite encouraged because the Iraqis took the decision to have a training presence,” Mr. Jeffrey said.

Although both countries said they would continue to discuss training options, the ambassador’s statement was puzzling because the Iraqi government will not give the trainers immunity, making it highly unlikely the Americans would send a significant number here.

Later in the meeting, Mr. Jeffery again addressed the issue of whether he was disappointed with the outcome.

“Any political pluralistic process that leads to a common position in Iraq, we see as a success for our policy and the maturity of the Iraqi political system, regardless of the subject,” he said.

It had been widely known in Baghdad and Washington that the ambassador was in favor of keeping troops here. Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert on Iraq at the Brookings Institution in Washington who has developed close relationships with American commanders and diplomats here, said that he had spoken to Mr. Jeffrey several times about his desire to keep troops in Iraq beyond the end of the year.

“From my conversations with Ambassador Jeffrey, he said he believed keeping troops in Iraq would be very useful, if not essential, to the Iraqis’ peaceful democratic development,” Mr. Pollack said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Pollack said he understood why diplomats did not always acknowledge that their arguments had been overruled.

“For a diplomat, the game is never over,” he said. “The end of one thing is the beginning of the next one. The embassy has to continue to work with Washington and Baghdad. If they expressed disappointment, it would be harder to deal with them in the future.”

Much of why the deal – which was apparently closer to getting done than many had thought – flopped was probably out of the ambassador’s control.

Two weeks ago, the Iraqi government torpedoed plans to keep troops in Iraq when they said they would not provide immunity to American forces, a legal protection the Defense Department insists on for troops on the ground in a foreign country.

President Obama had little interest in spending his waning political capital on keeping troops in Iraq, and Iraqi politicians could not commit to giving the American troops immunity from Iraqi law.

Andrea Bruce for The New York TimesAhmed Chalabi on a tour of his family’s farm in Baghdad.

“It’s the fact that it became impossible for Iraqi politicians — despite what they wanted — to accept the presence of American troops,” said Ahmad Chalabi, an early proponent of the American invasion of Iraq and a veteran politician who is a member of Parliament in the Iraqi National Alliance. “A lot of people in the political arena wanted the Americans to stay, but they could not bring themselves to translate this into a publicly held position and actually call for American immunity in Iraq,” he said during an interview at his farm in Baghdad.

Mr. Chalabi said that Sunni politicians could not commit to it because they had “built their constituencies on the resistance to the Americans.”

“None of them could come out and say they would vote for immunity,” he said. “On the other hand, the Shia politicians in power would be more comfortable with American presence but they couldn’t push the issue of immunity.”

Mr. Chalabi said that it became clear to him in early September at a meeting of the Iraqi National Alliance that all the troops would leave.

Mr. Maliki had just been told by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that there would be no trainers in Iraq after the end of the year if they didn’t get immunity, according to Mr. Chalabi.

After the National Alliance unanimously decided to support the American withdrawal, “at that point it became impossible for immunity to pass,” Mr. Chalabi said.

Ultimately, Mr. Chalabi said, there was a disconnect between the Iraqi government, the Americans on the ground here and the White House.

“The Americans who are here, wanted a lot more American presence,” he said. “They thought it was a pity and a waste that after all of this and all the money spent and all the bases built that they would shrink to almost nothing. I think President Obama is wise and brave in taking this decision. It is time to cut the Gordian knot.”

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At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. The New York Times's award-winning team provides insight — and answers questions — about combatants on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle.

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